Nomination Title: The Right Technology to Support Rapid Resource Changes in Customer Service

Tell the story about how technology has improved your customer service initiatives since the beginning of July 2015 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

Arise has developed a proprietary software application for workforce management (WFM) that is uniquely designed to support a large-scale, non-employee workforce that is rapidly becoming a mainstream approach to work in the shared economy. The company is in the process of commercializing the application for release of version 3.0, for external companies.

Arise is a pioneer of on-demand customer management, leveraging a network of thousands of micro-call centers (often 1-10 persons) and managed with Starmatic® 2.0, Arise’s proprietary WFM application. This patented, Smithsonian Institute award-winning cloud-based technology allows for fast, flexible and secure agent scheduling for a workforce that is external to the company. Starmatic® enables call center agents to schedule themselves in 30-minute increments, any day of the week or time of day, 24/7/365. It is designed to accommodate agents’ schedules and personal lives. For example, a mother of two might elect to work from 9: 00-9: 30am, attend to her children balance of the day, and re-engage from 4: 00pm-5: 30pm. This proprietary scheduling system truly allows agents the flexibility to work when they want to work and accommodate the independent nature of an external workforce.

In Q4 2015, Arise introduced a major release of Starmatic® 2.0, which included substantial upgrades to features and functions, including:

1. Starmatic® Swapping was designed to allow agents to trade schedules to ensure that Arise is meeting client requirements and service levels, if an agent is not able to service. The Shift Swapping self-service feature helps enhance the flexibility of schedules while maintaining acceptable service levels and quality. This features allows agents to post, negotiate and request entire or partial shift swaps, ultimately driving schedule adherence.
2. Starmatic® Mobile was designed to allow agents to see available schedules at any place and at any time. This allows agents to fill schedules even when they are not in front of their computers.
3. Starmatic® Text messaging was designed to allow agents to receive urgent service updates from Arise straight to their mobile phone via text message. The objective of this program was to allow agents to stay updated with urgent service opportunities and accept these opportunities, on the go.

In conjunction with these new features, Arise was able to launch two related programs and processes leveraging Starmatic to further optimize the workforce management process.

• Star Program is a real time performance program that constantly benchmarks call center businesses and their agents against client performance metrics and their peers on the same client customer service program.
• Pre-Select Groups Dynamic Shift Building allows Arise to dynamically review agent performance on a weekly or bi-weekly basis to prioritize the highest quality performers when scheduling work increments.

Starmatic’s® new features, and processes has allowed this technology to act as a virtual exchange solution whereby agents are able to bid for time slots based on their past performance.

As a result of the implementation of the Starmatic® 2.0 features, we saw improvements in the areas listed above.

• Commitment Adherence improved from 69% to 85% within the first six months
• Swap Rate improved from 70% to 87%
• No Show Rate improved due to non-swap hours by 34%
• Mobile Population has continued to grow each month, with 75% of the users coming from the Android OS and 25% from the Apple OS
• Text Message Opt In – improved from 0% to over 68% of the agents opting in

What makes our innovation unique is the combination of demand and workforce planning, linked to performance management and engagement models that can be delivered anytime, anywhere. These systems and processes have been deployed over an extended period across five countries, and over 40,000 external agents.